Reluctant political activist Derek Bruey remains mystified as to why state government embraced a procedure allowing Kansans to easily obtain a driver’s license and register for a potential military draft yet transformed voter registration into a bureaucratic quagmire.

“I’m enough of a citizen to fight for my country, but I’m not enough of a citizen to vote in leaders who would send me to war?” he said.

Bruey, a student at Wichita State University, went to a driver’s licence bureau operated by the Kansas Department of Revenue with four pieces of identification. He had in tow a birth certificate, school ID, Social Security card and bank statement.

It was useful for a driver’s license but was unhelpful in terms of meeting the state’s new citizenship requirement for voter registration. That is because the revenue department filed the voter registration application but didn’t collect documents needed to affirm his eligibility.

That placed Bruey among more than 15,000 Kansans who decided after Jan. 1 to renew a license and, after prompting, agreed to register to vote. Due to implementation of a law requiring proof of citizenship for new voters, each of these applications were funneled into the “suspended” category at the Kansas Secretary of State’s office because citizenship proof hadn’t been submitted.

The state’s existing mechanism for thwarting illegal immigrants from casting ballots requires Kansans caught in this administrative vortex to later present one of 13 identification documents — birth certificate or passport, for example — at offices of a county clerk or county election officer before earning certification as a viable voter from Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the architect of this registration overhaul.

The situation inspired House and Senate Democrats to push a voting registration reform measure — unsuccessfully — during last week’s special session of the Legislature. It also has triggered attempts by the revenue department and Kobach to change procedures to minimize fallout.

At this juncture, anyone renewing a license is handed a receipt — the actual license arrives later in the mail — that contains an explanation of how a person can complete the voter registration process.

“We comply with all state and federal law,” said Jeannine Koranda, spokeswoman for the revenue department.

Kay Curtis, spokeswoman for Kobach, said negotiations with the revenue department had resulted in a previously undisclosed agreement to adopt a revised procedure at vehicle registration offices.

In the future, Curtis said, state employees processing license renewals will be able to copy citizenship-proving documents of any Kansan signing up to vote. This documentation would be sent electronically to the secretary of state’s office and, if accepted, keep those people off the limbo list.

During the Legislature’s special session Tuesday and Wednesday, Rep. Jim Ward and Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, both Wichita Democrats, tried a different tack.

They attempted to address the issue by amending a sentencing bill that would take the thunder out of Kobach’s citizenship mandate for voters.

The proposed amendments were ruled out of order by the Republican-led committees in the House and Senate.

The Democrats would have added to current state law a provision similar to federal law that enables Kansans to sign an affidavit declaring they were a U.S. citizen. That assertion, if false, could trigger felony charges. This federal provision is applicable for people voting in national elections.

Ward said the current voter ID system amounted to suppression of Kansans’ right to express their political preference.

“It came as no surprise that the House ruled the amendment not germane,” he said. “I still had to offer it because this is something that has to be fixed. All Kansans deserve the right to cast a ballot.”

“As Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter,’ ” Faust-Goudeau said. “This matters, and we are not going to be silent about it.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Western Missouri, the League of Women Voters of Lawrence-Douglas County and Equality Kansas have expressed opposition to the citizenship requirement for voter registration.

“Kansas’ documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement is preventing thousands of Kansas citizens from completing the registration process for no good purpose,” said Holly Weatherford, advocacy director for the ACLU. “There are over 15,000 Kansans who have complied with federal law, and it’s time to register them, let them vote, and have their votes be counted.”

On the contrary, Kobach said, the citizenship rule is operating as it should. He said instances of illegal immigrants attempting to sign up to vote in Kansas had recently been documented in Sedgwick County. In addition, he said, at least five individuals who weren’t in the United States legally voted in Kansas elections from 2006 to 2012.

The citizenship reforms adopted by the state Legislature in 2011 will reduce election fraud, Kobach said.

The argument doesn’t carry much weight with Aaron Belenky, an Overland Park computer programmer who had his registration application placed on hold. He may not be able to participate in the city’s election next month.

“My voter registration has been unlawfully suspended,” he said. “It’s a sad day when our elected officials, who are sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution, instead use their office to pursue a divisive political agenda at the expense of the people’s right to vote.”

He is irritated enough to grant the ACLU permission to list him among three Kansans in a notice to Kobach’s office threatening a federal lawsuit if the state declined to drop the proof-of-citizenship mandate.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a provision requiring proof of citizenship passed by Arizona voters in a 2004 referendum.

Kobach said he was unmoved by rumbling by the ACLU and indicated the citizenship rule was no different than a host of other mandates — age and residency — defining who was eligible to vote in Kansas. The state allows people on the suspense list to copy images of the proper documents and personally deliver or send by email or the postal service the material to election offices to complete the process.

“It is hardly surprising that some newly registered voters are taking their time providing citizenship documents,” he said.

Kobach filed a lawsuit in conjunction with election officials in Arizona against the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The complaint asserts the EAC unlawfully declined to amend the voter registration form used in Kansas to reflect the state’s position that a verbal pledge of citizenship, without proof, was inadequate.

He said Kansans who use the federal form and fail to provide proof of citizenship will be permitted to vote in federal elections only. They will be granted access to state and local elections only after submitted a citizenship document, he said.

“Kansas voters will be best served when the EAC amends the Kansas-specific instructions on the federal form to include submitting concrete evidence of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote,” Kobach said.

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Personal responsibility is fine and dandy, but it won't pay the bills. If you work during the day and can't just take off willy-nilly without pay to go stand in line at yet another government agency, do you deserve to vote?

I'm asking that in all sincerity, because apparently you think that only people with paid vacations and middle-class or better livelihoods deserve to be able to vote. I think that's incredibly elitist, but invite you to defend that viewpoint if you can.

Kennedy won Illinois by less than 9,000 votes out of 4.75 million cast, or a margin of 0.2%.However, Nixon carried 92 of the state's 101 counties, and Kennedy's victory in Illinois came from the city of Chicago, where Mayor Richard J. Daley held back much of Chicago's vote until the late morning hours of November 9. The efforts of Daley and the powerful Chicago Democratic organization gave Kennedy an extraordinary Cook County victory margin of 450,000 votes—more than 10% of Chicago's 1960 population of 3.55 million, although Cook County also includes many suburbs outside of Chicago's borders—thus barely overcoming the heavy Republican vote in the rest of Illinois. Earl Mazo, a reporter for the pro-Nixon New York Herald Tribune, investigated the voting in Chicago and claimed to have discovered sufficient evidence of vote fraud to prove that the state was stolen for Kennedy.

Virginia's State Board of Elections announced last week that it's working with registrars to erase an estimated 10,000 dead people from the commonwealth's voting rolls. Earlier this year, NPR reported that an estimated 1.8 million dead people were registered nationally.

Guess even paying the poll tax means nothing. The guy in the article learned how politicians really feel about those who serve in the military: we pretend to love you until we're re-elected then you can go to hell.

There are close to two and a half million deaths in the United States every year. Even if each state purges its rolls every single year, there's going to be lots and lots of "dead people" still registered.

Now, how do you prove you are purging dead voters and not just people who have the same or similar names? Remember when Kobach was talking about the dead voter in Wichita casting votes? Remember when the "dead" guy answered the phone and explained he wasn't really dead? (It was his father or maybe uncle, who shared the same name, who had died.) How would you feel if Vent in Miami died, so now Vent in Orlando or Vent in Tampa gets purged from the rolls and can't vote anymore?

He had a birth certificate - took it to get his drivers license. Why couldn't he have gone back home when he was told he needed it, retrieved it and gone back there or to any other voter registration site and presented it.

"Bruey, a student at Wichita State University, went to a driver’s licence bureau operated by the Kansas Department of Revenue with four pieces of identification. He had in tow a birth certificate, school ID, Social Security card and bank statement."

He had his birth certificate with him. Having his birth certificate with him at a voter registration site was not sufficient. Taking that certificate to "any other voter registration site" would not have been sufficient either. ONLY presenting it to the county elections office (in some counties, the same as the county clerk) would have been sufficient. The county elections office needs to see the original of his birth certificate.

that the registration process is explained on the receipt given to the person doing his/her renewal....
the "in the future" paragraph states that the documents can be copied at renewal time now, and should keep "those people off the list."
in other words,, they found a problem and worked to correct it. anybody legally able to vote will be able to and apparently the dept of revenue needed a procedure change...even though the instructions were printed on the receipt that people receive at time of renewal...

just like the state isn’t clear how many of the adults receiving food stamps in the county fall into one of the categories of Disabled, Adults with Children, and who are over 50.
Seem's like the state or STATE'S need to work on a system to coordinate statistics.

They KNEW there was a problem; they KNEW the system the DMV used could not send copies to the election offices. It wasn't something they just discovered; the revenue dept testified about it before the legislature (Director of Vehicles Donna Shelite, March 2012 and I think other occasions), months before it went into effect. They HOPE that at some future point this will be fixed.

And previous articles have made plain that they were not passing out the receipt until fairly recently; that's part of the procedural changes they made when it became obvious that a lot of people didn't know that filling out the voter registration form didn't actually register them as voters.

You republicans just see and R and hit the check mark. Remember the story last election about the guy who voted for a member of the Phelps Clan and didn't even realize it. He just saw and R and said that's my guy. And you say Democrats are dumb voters.

Liberals believe in the illegal vote and voting often, if you can't get through the process to vote, then maybe you don't have any business stepping up to the voting booth. Slash follow the rules, there are many laws we don't agree with- stop whining.

The federal rules say that anybody can register to vote by filling out a form swearing they are eligible. Yes, let's follow those rules. Don't agree with the federal motor voter law? Well, there are many laws we don't agree with--stop whining.

See, that's the whole crux of the problem. The feds passed a law (twenty years ago) that set forth the rules for voter registration. Mr. Kobach didn't like the rules, so he got Kansas to pass new and different rules that don't follow the federal law. The Supreme Court already tossed Arizona's version of "new and different rules that don't follow the federal law"; Kansas is very likely to lose too. Mr. Kobach, though, doesn't like the 'stop whining' advice--he'd rather spend your tax money defending a law that is very likely to be tossed.

If the Revenue has/is not collecting the information proving citizenship because they haven't "had to", the state messed this up big time. Anywhere one is allowed to register to vote, those handling the registration should be able to collect all information to make the voter registration work (assuming the person is eligible to vote). If that means training people to know how to recognize whether a document is real or not, then train them. If someone shows up to renew their driver's license and then agrees to register to vote, the state better darn well be ready to accept that person's documentation they have with them.

I'll be happy to point you to the articles from last year when Donna Shelite testified that the system wasn't ready, e.g.

And you are correct--little green men from Mars could come fill out the form and swear they are someone else or a US citizen. That's about as likely as lots of Mexican nationals deciding to come out of the shadows to vote, so we must remain ever vigilant, lest we end up electing Marvin the Martian as president.

You are proposing a solution in search of a problem, a "solution" that meanwhile creates other problems. An election in which lawful voters are denied a ballot is no more free or fair or equitable than one in which unlawful voters do cast ballots. Why are you so adamant about the second, and perfectly okay with the former?

If you already have said documents whats so hard about showing them or sending in copies? I had to when I moved to Kansas. Just dont wait until the last minute or you will have to wait until the next election to vote.

"Bruey, a student at Wichita State University...had in tow a birth certificate, school ID, Social Security card and bank statement."

Wow. It sounds like the Driver's License bureau is trying to make it difficult for poor people to get a license. Why wasn't the young fella complaining about that?

Oh...there's a clue right in the first sentence.

It's not really about that. He's a student, and has been bitten by the Liberal Indoctrination bug in public school and college, and just felt he MUST speak out about the "injustice" of requiring people to prove citizenship to participate in the ONE THING in this country that is reserved EXCLUSIVELY for actual citizens.

American Heritage Dictionary definition of fascism: "...a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

"In Brazil, the vote is compulsory to all citizens between 18 and 70 years old. In order to vote all citizens must:

be registered to vote;
report in person to the his/her voting section;
present an official identity document with photo, usually the regular ID card (cédula de identidade).

Since 2006 the Brazilian Electoral Justice is re-registering voters with biometric identification. In the 2014 elections more than 22 million voters (out of 141 million) will be identified by fingerprints."

Republicans in recent elections have shown an increased propensity toward all kinds of election-rigging (not that Democrats have never tried it, but not, to my knowledge, on the scale of behind-the-scenes GOP activists). That is, who's defrauding who?

The novel idea is this: What if ALL Americans of voting age were REQUIRED by law to vote? Tell you what, Republicans would never go for it. They want LESS people voting, preferably those Democrats with cooties.